Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimisation’
Yahoo! Site Explorer expecting updates?
Yahoo! Site Explorer is currently down for maintenance. We suspect this could be a sign of new features being made available.
Yahoo’s site explorer is a great Search Engine Optimisation Tool to analyse traffic sources such as back-links to your site, and also the pages on your website that Yahoo! indexes.
We suspect this maintenance downtime has been planned by Yahoo! in anticipation of new updates being implemented.
We’ll be excited to see more handy search analytics tools and reporting functions made available from Yahoo, and we’ll keep you posted with any updates.
Finance Markets and changes in Search
The recent Global Financial crisis has hit home in almost every market, and not even the Internet Giants like Google and Yahoo are immune.
Recent movement in financial markets has resulted a major reduction in advertising budgets, and seen approximately $6.7 billion wiped off projected search advertising revenue projected in 2010 according to finance analysts.
These are certainly interesting times, and it highlights the need for companies to be smarter than every before when it comes to Search Marketing to get the most from their advertising budget.
Close monitoring of Pay Per Click campaigns is needed and ongoing refinement to ensure that advertisers are minimising their cost per click, whilst maximising their return on investment, as you want to avoid as many dead clicks as possible.
It also means that companies who have been putting off their SEO Project because they prefer to see the immediate benefits and ROI may be best diverting some of their budget to result in a longer-term return with improved results in the organic SERPS, that in the long-run will assist in reducing their PPC costs, or work in concert with Pay Per Click campaigns.
This SearchNews article is brought to you by SearchKing, Experts in Search.
Splash Pages, Why they’re bad for Search
Remember the early days of internet usage? I’m not talking back in the 70s or 80s when internet used to be very basic HTML websites and text-based bulletin boards, I’m thinking more along the lines of the late 90s and early 21st century when the internet was becoming mass-market, and people first started experiencing the web and it’s potential.
The early days of web publishing saw an abundance of terrible looking websites churned out by Frontpage and worse, MS Publisher. The thought of a yellow-text website on blue background makes me want to cringe.
Fortunately for many of us, new content management systems and web design packages are standards compliant and pre-loaded with many visually appealing sites that can be built and published by even the most inexperienced internet user.
But despite all of the great lengths we’ve gone since the days of ugly websites, I’m still seeing a lot of websites that present “spash” pages, or intro pages to visitors upon first visit to their website.
I too have been guilty of using splash pages, and despite being a little outdated and unprofessional (if not done properly), splash pages can be bad for search marketing.
For starters, splash pages are generally presented in GIF, JPEG or Flash multimedia images, and search engines for the most part index text, which is where most of your search marketing efforts lie.
Due to the lack of text, a search engine is generally unable to determine the page relevance to search terms and categorised data on your website, so therefore the spash page is likely to have a much poorer page rank (or none at all) when compared to other pages on your site that are loaded with relevant information and key words.
You ideally want your homepage/start page to be the first thing that a visitor sees when they land on your page, and you want this information to rank well.
Internet users are very savvy, they use tabbed browsing and skim through information on many pages to quickly find the data they need.
If you’re presenting a splash page to a person who has clicked through a search engine, they need to wait or make an additional click to get through to the information, and you can’t afford to be adding these hurdles to your visitors, especially when you’ve paid for them to click on your advertised link in the search engines.
Additionally, pagerank is usually much lower due to the lack of information on the splash page when compared to other pages on your site that actually do contain relevant information and keywords, this is where you want to attain higher page rank and have your visitors land when they click on your link or paid advertisement.
Tip: remove your landing page and present your visitors with relevant information as soon as possible and you’re likely to attract their attention long enough that they stay on the page and find what they’re looking for, or in many cases, find the product or service they’ve been searching for, which will hopefully convert to a sale.
Be on the lookout later this week for more news from search king related to landing pages, part of a good search advertising campaign.
Google Trends
A new tool recently launched by Google, which is very useful for Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising is a tool called Search Trends:
This tool allows you to view historical search data related to key word searches performed by internet users dating back to 2004
Search Analysis - Google Trends
Google previously had a site similar to this which displayed only select popular search terms on an annual basis, and this report is referred to as the Google zeitgeist
This new Google Trends tool was released by Google last month and contains much more information, that has presumably been gathering data since 2004, launched now to to provide historical data.
This is a fantastic tool for SEO, as it allows you to perform search engine analysis to see what your target audience is searching for, and gage the popularity of certain key words, phrases or search terms which is indicated by the number of times the phrase has been searched for.
It’s great for narrowing down region-specific search results, by Country and can even State and Territory based results in some cases.
This is the tool that search engines optimisaton specialists have been waiting for. Book mark the site today.